Searching for the missing pieces of climate change communication

Category Archives: Activism

Looking at the story about the cross-equatorial flow and the subsequent declaration of an emergency, I became curious about the Beckwith video that would give more explanation. Watching it was quite an experience. This is what he said after introducing himself:

For many years I have been talking about abrupt climate change and how the climate system is no longer behaving like it used to. We no longer have this stable, predictable system that we had. We gone to a chaotic system. As we transition in a non-linear fashion to a warmer world, we see a complete redistribution of jet streams and ocean currents.

Huh?!?!?!

I did’t expect something like that from someone who calls himself a “Climate System” scientist. The climate system, being a complex, coupled, chaotic system, is by its very nature unpredictable. How could he think that it ever was stable and predictable before?

Environmental Scientists fear a “global climate crisis” after the jet stream from the northern hemisphere crossed the equator. That would provide unprecedented changes in weather patterns. Global food production is threatened and winter as we know it would be doomed. Not to mention summer.

and further in the article:

“Our climate continues to behave in new and frightening ways. This was never predicted and we have never seen this before. Welcome to climate chaos. We should declare a state of emergency global climate.”

“The food supply will be affected and these changes have the potential to cause major geopolitical unrest. Strange things are happening on our planet.”

“More being cleared than being planted” and “more are disappearing”, if I understand that well, it means that the area is going down, so less hectares occupied by woods each year that is passing.

The same thing in the foreword of the quiz from De Afspraak[talk show on the Flemish Television] (translated from Dutch, my emphasis):

Environmental organization BOS+ examined at the request of Knack [a Flemish magazine] what the real state of the woods is in Flanders. The study found there are more woods being cleared than planted, contrary to the claims of Schauvliege [Flemish Minister of Nature].

Deforestation permits were issued for on average of 300 hectares of woods per year in the past ten years. In 2014 – the latest year for which figures are available – 263 hectares were cleared. In 2012 it was 195 hectares and in 2013 193 hectares.

More being cleared than being planted, that also looks like a downward trend to me. They also looked at previous years and found that 195 hectares were cleared in 2012, 193 hectares in 2013 and 263 hectares in 2014. So from the years that were presented, one could assume that there was an increase in cleared area over the last three years.

All in all, everything in the communication seems to assume that the numbers go down, that woods got lost. Remember that 263 number. It is important further in the post.

But I had more questions than answers. It was all rather vaguely presented and only with partial numbers. Something didn’t seem right. The first red flag was that if the average number of cleared woods in the last decade is 300 hectares and in the last three years 195, 194 and 263 hectares were cleared, then what about the previous years? 194, 195 and 263 are all less than 300, does this mean that there were much more permits given before that?

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Recently I viewed the video Sen. Cruz Questioning Sierra Club President Aaron Mair on Climate Change in the Judiciary Subcommittee on “Over-regulation and its impact on minority communities”. The video was from a couple weeks ago and went viral at that time. It became perfectly clear why when I at last viewed it. Skeptics got used to be viewed as the underdog and blamed for not having the evidence on their side, but in this video we saw Mr. Mair initially claiming to be driven by the science, the evidence and the data, yet when the questioning advanced, it became quickly clear that he wasn’t driven by the science, nor by the evidence, nor by the data. He probably wouldn’t even notice the science, even if it bit him. 😉

This is how the story goes. In his written testimony, the president of the Sierra Club wrote that the science behind climate change and its effect on minority communities should not be up for debate, which provoked a sequence of questions from Senator Cruz, which the president of the Sierra Club had a hard time answering. Just watch the video if you didn’t already.

Motl’s article was the first that I read in that regard and it seemed to me that he took it with a healthy dose of humor. Motl and Cook are not exactly best friends. John Cook wrote on SkS a list of Global Warming & Climate Change Myths (I have to admit that I used that list quite often when I was looking for information on global warming in the early days – shame on me) and Luboš Motl then wrote a rebuttal of every point on that list (I later read this list with even more pleasure – it turned out all right after all). The whole controversy came when Motl found out John Cook using the handle “Lubos_Motl”, apparently made comments on a (skeptical looking) blog post (but written by Cook himself) in a way that Motl personally wouldn’t do. In fact misrepresenting his ideas.

My first reaction was amazement. Wasn’t there something like the separation of powers? Yet, now judicial power is intervening with legislative power. Aren’t they a democracy? Yet, now a small activist group is bypassing the majority.

Then there was this statement made after the judgement that kept on resonating in my head:

“A courageous judge. This is fantastic,” said Sharona Ceha, another Urgenda worker. “This is for my children and grandchildren.”

In a way, I can agree with this one, but obviously not how they see it…

Let’s for a moment look at reality. Global warming/climate change is something, well, global. If you just look at the global emissions, they go up, steeply up. Three countries are responsible for more than half of the emissions and for 3/4 of the increase in global emission compared to 2012. These are China (which isn’t planning to decrease emissions until 2030), USA (which is telling that it favors emission reduction, but doesn’t ratify anything and knowing the republicans are in the majority, this could make it rather difficult) and India (which said they will not decrease emissions in the first place).

Let’s look at some numbers to get some feel for the proportions. These are the three largest emitters which consists of more than half of the emissions compared with the total emissions and emissions of the Netherlands: